Self-service entrepreneur Dean Ward is the latest guest on the hit Dealmaker Uncut Podcast with Jonathan Boyers and Chris Maguire.
Dean Ward is the co-founder and chief product officer at Wirral-based-Evoke Creative, which can count McDonald’s, JD Sports, Google, Subway and Burger King among its clients.
The game-changing moment for Evoke came in 2015 when it secured a multi-million order from McDonald’s that led to 5,000 kiosks – despite only having 15 staff!
Ward told the podcast’s hosts Jonathan Boyers and Chris Maguire how the deal came about.
“We’d spoken to McDonald’s two years previously at a show and suddenly this email comes through and it’s an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said.
“We were a small company with 15 staff but we decided to go for it. It was the sort of opportunity we were not going to get again.
“We blew their socks off. We developed the product and brought a lot of efficiencies. We won the deal and we literally doubled in size overnight.”
Their success led them to winning customers all over the world in the retail and hospitality space as staff numbers grew to around 150 and a turnover of £35m.
What made their story even more incredible was the company’s growth was bootstrapped until 2018 when it received the first of two investments from BGF.
BGF initially invested £6m in November 2018 and made a multi-million pound follow-on investment in 2023 following significant contract wins and international growth.
Ward said: “We chose BGF because they invest in the management. They’re quite light touch.
“When we started working with Subway and Burger King at the same time we either went for it or didn’t accept the order. We needed working capital to be able to buy the product.”
Boyers is the head of Alvarez & Marsal Corporate Finance team and Maguire is BusinessCloud’s executive editor.
The Dealmaker Uncut podcast has been produced by Manchester-based What Media.
Listen to the Dean Ward podcast here